Too dear for my possessing
by Gwen77
Summary: Georgette Heyer's Venetia, Jasper and Venetia's marriage. Warning for infidelity. Title from Shakespeare's sonnet 87: Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing, And like enough thou know'st thy estimate: The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing; My bonds in thee are all determinate.
It was raining - slow monotonous winter rain, tap tap tap, heard rather than seen behind the black windows. The book wasn't holding his attention. Yorkshire could be the very devil.

He glanced up irritably and saw Venetia at the other end of the room, bending, lighting a candle. For a moment, her face gleamed with an uncanny beauty in the sudden richness of candlelight. Glowing. Goddess-like. Then she made a face, a funny little moue of exasperation as the candle dripped wax onto the shining new-polished table, and a laugh burst out of him.

She startled, and then looked up at him inquiringly, not seeing the joke yet. He held out his hands and she came readily; his book slipped to the floor and her soft weight filled his hands and his lap and he forgot the rain for the moment.

For the moment. But Yorkshire was the very devil and Venetia wasn't - couldn't be - always enchanting. She had so few megrims and moods herself that, in his worst moments, her very cheerfulness grated on his nerves. Sometimes, in the very early mornings, he looked down at her sleeping face and thought _my wife_ and felt nothing but a kind of blank astonishment. How had he got here? Had she somehow trapped him after all? Then her eyes would open, and she would blink foolishly and uncertainly up at him for the first few seconds after waking, and a wave of tenderness swept the feeling away. He did love her. But Yorkshire was the very devil.

"Do you," Venetia said tentatively, three weeks into the winter. "Shall we go to - to Egypt again?"

He smiled up at her. She had picked the country at random, he knew, eager to find him the very antithesis of Yorkshire in winter - perceptive darling - but she knew the idea was absurd.

"We can't go to Egypt every winter, my heart," he said. "Even your purse-strings wouldn't stand it."

She flinched, unexpectedly, and he realised what he had said and heard the note of strained bitterness that had come into his voice. Her purse-strings. He took her hand and put it penitently to his lips.

"I'm a boor," he said. Her eyes suddenly danced with laughter. /p

"You aren't," she said, mock-indignantly. "Even when you were wicked, you were emnever/em clumsy. But I wish you wouldn't talk nonsense about mine and yours, Damerel. You know I don't know the difference."

She was, still, such a delight. So equable, so loving, so brilliantly witty and childishly tender. The fact that his fingers itched and he occasionally longed to break every piece of china in this damned staid house - that had nothing to do with her. She would break the china with him, no doubt, if he once began. The room felt too small.

"Let's go," he said suddenly. "Not to Egypt. Venice. Venice in winter is glorious."

So they wintered in Venice. It was, indeed, glorious. Venetia's eyes were bluer than the sky. She touched his face once, and the joy overflowing from her felt nothing like a trap or a demand. Everything was glorious. But then the year turned and it was time for London and then Yorkshire and they had been married two years and Venetia was pregnant.

He was terrified. He hadn't understood terror, bodily terror, before now. He had never bothered much about his own body. But Venetia's body - Venetia's empain/em - her labour was the worst six hours of his life. She was paper-white when he saw her again. But she smiled with relief to see him and the wrinkled scowling boy was a comical vermillion, screaming lustily, and the terror subsided for the moment into laughter.

Thomas was surprisingly like Damerel had been - a dark and heavy-browed child, easily shaken by rapid fits of temper and raucous laughter. Venetia was frankly baffled by him, and so Damerel took a hand, amused to see that all Venetia's success in managing his own temper and Aubrey's moodiness came about by sheer instinct. She had no notion of applying the same technique to the boy. She tried to emreason/em with him almost before he could speak. He adored her - as who would not - but it was Damerel who could soothe his tempers and control his conduct. So the years went by and Thomas scowled and sputtered milk and walked and shouted and eventually grew old enough for a tutor.

By then Damerel had been married ten years. Eleven. Twelve. He still woke, from time to time, astonished at his life. Married, a father, a respectable country gentleman whose life was all taken up with domestic and county matters and the management of his estates. Then Thomas went to Eton and, without quite knowing it, some leash within him slackened.

He saw Venetia cast him uneasy looks, knew his face was settling into old sneering lines at county balls and deadly dull dinner parties, but he couldn't help it. Something was stirring impatiently in his blood and Venetia - delightful, affectionate, giddy, brilliant - was too familiar to really charm him into forgetfulness. His tongue sharpened. He resorted to burgundy more and more. And in London he began to notice other women, notice them purposefully. Dark eyes with heavy lids to them. Red hair like fire. Haughty mouths, intriguingly pursed. Delicate high breasts under thin muslin.

Venetia had given him carte blanche, once, years ago, before they were married. He had always thought of it as a joke. But now - now - he didn't know. It was probably only a matter of time, he thought grimly, and wondered if he could speak to Venetia of it. But then he found himself drunk at a party without her, and there was a woman in the shrubbery, all in silver with dark dark hair and eyebrows, and it was too late to speak to Venetia.

When he came home, still drunk, he was bitterly ashamed and obscurely angry about that sense of shame. She had promised, when they married, not to leash him. What had she to complain about? That she hadn't complained - that she was bent over a book in the library and smiled welcome at him when he came in - was somehow another offence.

"What is it?" she said quickly, the moment she saw his face, her smile fading, and he shook his head.

"Nothing to concern you, my love," he said. The woman in the shrubbery had been very slender, fine-boned and angular; nothing like Venetia's perfect proportions. She was very still under his comparing hands, unusually still, watching his face intently. When he kissed her, he was shocked at his own roughness, but she seemed not to be; her fingers gripped at his wrists, tight enough to bruise, but she offered no resistance at all. Her face was white when the kiss broke and her blue eyes dimmed. He had only seen her look like that once before, in the library when he had told her to leave him, and the memory twisted his heart and made him angrier than ever.

"You said," he said, his voice shaking, and she nodded.

"I remember," she said, dully. "I said it would be my fault."

He stared, dumbfounded. He had forgotten that piece of nonsense. Of course it wasn't her fault. She was utterly perfect. He opened his mouth to tell her so.

"I did warn you," he heard himself say instead. "You _would_ marry me."

She nodded silently and he couldn't bear the look in her face any longer and turned away.

It was madness. It wasn't even pleasurable. Flattering, cajoling, paying, buying roses; it was tedious, frankly, and he was too old for it. But the trapped feeling was gone. He was himself again, absolutely, bound by nothing but his own whim and desire. Venetia never spoke of the others again. There was a little shadow of something in her eyes but she gave no sign of reproach or even unhappiness. She smiled often. If - rarely - he came to her bed, he would find her politely compliant. It was horrible and tawdry, but he couldn't stop.

He couldn't explain it even to himself, let alone to her, but he went back again and again to that first promise. She had sworn she wouldn't change him. And she had, with a finality and unalterability that was shocking. His stomach burned with guilt. He thought of her constantly - not with easy desire or with easy affection but with painful anxiety. He had hurt her, on purpose, to prove he was free to, and it felt like he had cut into his own flesh.

"It's an odd thing," he said to her, at breakfast, watching her silently butter her toast. "Marriage."

She looked up at him, quickly, and for the first time he saw a flash of real anger - fury./p

"Is it," she said flatly, coldly, and his stomach clenched with dread. He made himself go on.

"I didn't know," he said, stammering a little to his own astonishment. He hadn't stammered in about thirty years. "What it would be like. I thought - I love you, and I thought it would be - that would be all."

She put down her knife.

"But," she said heavily.

"It isn't all," he said. "The -" he struggled for words. She didn't help him, sat still as a stone at the other side of the table."

"I love you," he said again. "I don't - think I deserve you."

She looked at him for a long time, silently. It was a terrible look, weighing and thoughtful; there was pain in it but there was also a kind of awful detachment. She was thinking whether he deserved her. His heart began to pound horribly.

"You're so stupid," she said, tiredly. "emDeserve/em me? I'm not a - a yacht or a good conduct prize, Damerel. I'm your wife. You're my -" she gestured, a little helplessly and stopped, considering.

"You're mine," she said finally, and the hair at the back of his neck rose in something like terror. Her face was calm, a little pitying. "That's all there is to it."

"Yours," he said blankly. She nodded. His whole chest felt hollow, shivery, like a struck gong. He shook his head uncertainly.

"You said," he said tentatively, and she shrugged.

"I said you could choose," she said. "You can, I haven't stopped you." Her voice cracked. "I can't."

He put his hand on hers, dumbly, and she clasped it and smiled, watery but real.

"Stoopid," she said and he closed his eyes.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I won't be so stupid again."

pShe said nothing and he looked down at her.

"I swear it," he said. "Venetia. I won't."

"All right," she said, finally, and they sat for a while in silence. All the gold had gone out of the morning, and the sky was cloudy and grey, a drained and tired light. He was glad of her hand in his.


End file.
